Most businesses never think about the layer their software actually runs on — until the bill for it suddenly changes. For years, VMware ESXi was the quiet default: a mature, dependable platform for running business servers, with a free tier that made it accessible to smaller operations. Then Broadcom acquired VMware and, within months, restructured the licensing. The free tier disappeared and pricing moved to a model built around large enterprises.

For a large corporate, that is a line item. For a growing South African business running a few critical servers, it can mean a sudden, unbudgeted jump in cost for infrastructure that was working perfectly well the day before. Clients started asking us the obvious question: is there a serious alternative that does not lock us into someone else's pricing decisions?

There is. We now build on Proxmox VE — and after moving our own platform to it first, it is what we deploy and support for the businesses we work with.

What Proxmox Is, in Plain Terms

Virtualisation is the technology that lets one physical server safely run several isolated systems at once — your accounting server, your web application and your file server can all live on the same box without interfering with each other. It is how modern businesses get the most out of the hardware they own.

Proxmox VE is an established, open-source platform that does exactly this. It is used worldwide, backed by a company that sells optional support subscriptions, and has a large, active community. Crucially, it is open source: there is no licence that can be revoked or repriced out from under you. The software is free to run; you can pay for a support subscription if you want one, but you are never locked out of your own infrastructure by a vendor's commercial strategy.

"The value of open source here is not really about cost. It is about control — your infrastructure cannot be held hostage to a pricing change you had no say in."

What It Means for Your Business

The technology choice matters only because of what it delivers day to day. For the businesses we set this up for, the practical benefits are:

Is Open Source a Risk?

It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that "open source" and "unsupported" are not the same thing. The platform is used in production by organisations far larger than most of the businesses we serve. A paid support subscription is available directly from the vendor if a business wants that assurance. And because we deploy and manage the platform ourselves, our clients are not left to fend for themselves regardless — there is a phone number to call, and it is ours.

The bigger risk, in our view, sits on the other side: building your business on a proprietary platform whose owner has already shown it will change the terms with little notice.

Where This Fits

Not every business needs to think about this at all — if your systems live entirely in someone else's cloud, this is not your problem to solve. But if you run your own servers on site or in a data centre — an accounting system, a point-of-sale back end, file storage, line-of-business applications — then the platform underneath them is a decision worth getting right, and worth revisiting if you are currently exposed to VMware's new pricing.

This is part of how we approach IT infrastructure for the businesses we support: dependable, well-backed-up systems, without unnecessary licence costs or lock-in. If you are facing a VMware renewal you were not expecting, or you simply want a second opinion on the platform your business runs on, get in touch and we will talk it through in plain terms.